Any one recommend a path to get from newbie to fairly decent at Chess? I guess its like Holdem poker in that once you have played a few thousands hands / games you get better? Currently I am using "real poker online" under windows 10 but it has adverts so it has to change. what's the best program to learn chess over a year? edit: This is pretty cool to watch super computers play off vs each other (All the games of the 22nd World Computer Chess Championship)
No. The rules and stratagems are a bit more complex than that - not being snobbish here, simple fact. I'm pretty poor at chess, a reactionary player really - if computerisation is your preference then something like Chessmaster would be one of the best starts (any recent-ish version) it hasn't got the best AI in the world but as a beginner that's not what you want... what it has (had in my once-upon-a-time era of Chessmaster 3000) are some great tutorials and lessons based on classic games and combinations of moves / defensive and offensive positions. On a more bookish front I guess something like this or this might be a good start?
The Shannon number, named after Claude Shannon, is a conservative lower bound (not an estimate) of the game-tree complexity of chess of 10(to the power of) 120, based on an average of about 10(to power of) 3 possibilities for a pair of moves consisting of a move for White followed by one for Black, and a typical game lasting about 40 such pairs of moves. Shannon calculated it to demonstrate the impracticality of solving chess by brute force, in his 1950 paper "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess".[1] (This influential paper introduced the field of computer chess.) clicky Are there more possible legal moves in chess than there are atoms in the universe? Going to read that book 2 on first link,
Honestly - find somebody to play with. I was a member of the school Chess Club and we played several games one lunchtime every week. You will improve quickly by playing other people because you learn moves and combinations from them. Playing the computer is another alternative but I tend not to like it so much because it's very mechanical and unrealistic, unless you are at Grandmaster level and use Fritz which is widely regarded as the best chess engine.
Chessmaster is OK. Just OK. I got a (physical) "chess computer" (basically a chessboard with sensors and a little PC built in that could play as the opposition) when I was a kid that felt more balanced than the Chessmaster AI. Fritz is hands down the best chess engine, but so long as you have a human opponent who can do more than the same thing every time, a human will still be better to learn against. I have a grump against Fritz for their DRM, however. It sucks.
^ It's so true that having an opponent play the exact same way every time is quite unrealistic. But the flipside of that is that any AI blunders (in my experience) are equally unrealistic. I challenge my opponent's queen with a bishop... he castles. WTF? That's just crass.
What's classed as fairly decent? I played tournament level in the uk back in school and would consider myself at best average. Chess is easy to learn, playing a computer gets old, find real players. Plenty of chess clubs in the uk.
If your rating is over 1000 I'd say you're fairly decent, but at a chess club you'd probably encounter very high rated players. It's easy enough to learn the moves of the pieces but strategy takes years to learn because it's so damn complicated!
